Leading Up: How to Lead Your Boss So You Both Win

Today’s best leaders know how to lead up, a necessary strategy when a supervisor is micromanaging rather than macrothinking, when a division president offers clear directives but can’t see the future, or when investors demand instant gain but need long-term growth. Through vivid, compelling stories, Michael Useem reveals how upward leadership can transform incipient disaster into hard-won triumph. For example, U.S. Marine Corps General Peter Pace reconciled the conflicting priorities of six bosses by keeping them well informed and challenging their instructions when necessary. Useem also explores what happens when those who should step forward fail to do so—Mount Everest mountaineers might have saved themselves from disaster during a fateful ascent if only they had questioned their guides’ flawed decisions.

Leading Up is a call to action. It asks us to get results by helping our superiors lead and by building on the best in everybody’s nature, and it offers a pragmatic blueprint for doing so.

MICHAEL USEEM is a professor of management and the director of the Center for Leadership and Change Management at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. His previous book, The Leadership Moment: Nine True Stories of Triumph and Disaster and Their Lessons for Us All, offers compelling accounts of leadership when it really counted.